Photos of ancestors I wish I had:
-
-
There was a fight outside of the Christmas display windows at Saks Fifth Avenue when I was there on Saturday night. A fortyish white man with a leather bomber jacket with a round patch sown to the lapel was pointing accusingly at another guy in a baseball hat with a stroller. “You pushed me!” he yelled accusingly at the top of his lungs. The guy with the stroller looked taken aback. “You pushed me in line!”
This was kind of odd, since there were approximately nine hundred thousand people, all pushing each other to varying degrees, trying to get a look at the Saks windows with the animated dioramas inside. Suddenly, a scuffle ensued — the woman accompanying Patch-man grabbed the woman accompanying Stroller-man, held her by the shoulders of her calf-length down coat, and kneed her repeatedly in the shins. Things got a little confused, and a space rapidly cleared around the four. Suddenly, things stopped — a woman in her sixties was yelling loudly “There are children here!”, Stroller man was walking away, and Patch man was touching his lip and looking at his fingers exactly the way a cowboy in a western does. Once again, he pointed at Stroller man — “Well, he’s the asshole who punched me!”
It seems like Patch-man deserved what he got. For the next several minutes, people in the crowd rehashed the event, discussing who was in the right, who was in the wrong, whether Stroller man got in a good shot, and wondering what Patch-woman’s problem was. Police in leather jackets and fur hats scanned the crowd — maybe looking for the scufflers, maybe looking for (it occurred to me belatedly) the pickpockets that had set the fight up as a diversion. -
I actually used algebra in a (sort-of) real world application today, to the astonishment of seventh-graders everywhere. I was writing a content management tool for the Twist Magazine homepage, and wanted to make a “preview” function that showed what a component would look like — *before* saving that component to the SQL server database. So the script looked at the value of input boxes in given forms, using the forms array. Problem is that each element has at least three forms, but the first element has only two forms. So, to make a long story long, I had to map the numbers 2,3,4,5, et cetera, to the numbers 3,7,11,15,19, and so on. I was scratching my head for a long time, until I remembered to use slope-intercept form — y=mx+b — to figure out the function. Voila, the second number is four times the first minus five, done. Go home, watch the Simpsons, hooray!
-
I have a one-inch Fu Manchu button (a present) on my Dickies jacket now. Now I can be the bong-in-the-van rocker I never was in high school. The buttons are made by Kate’s brother Matt, who has a Philadelphia hardcore band called “Rain on the Parade“, a carefully restored Vespa scooter, and a carefully curled Kangol jeff cap. A month or so ago, Matt and his friends hung out on the Revelation Records website, made up fake Eurotrash names, and huckstered the euro-teens into using 1980s straight edge slang. “Ja, That LP is crucial!!”
-
A Sign of Armageddon: I went to McDonald’s tonight, and was given BOTH a Golden Dollar and a Susan B. Anthony dollar in change. They are sitting in unholy union on top of my scanner glass right now, two bucks worth of Evil Omen.
Boy, how right I was! Seven hours after I posted that bit, my Internet access mysteriously stopped working. The router, a Covad 8019, had mysteriously come unplugged in my LAN room. The address of the US Mint is 801 9th street. I’ve obviously messed with powers beyond my comprehension.
-
I went with my friend Jennifer Lindner to see the Oscar De La Joya/Sean Coley fight last February. I e-mailed a few friends about the fight, and my mom asked me to post what I’d written, so here it is!
PS. Hi mom!
-
According to the chart on my bathroom wall (that’s a sticky picture of it,) I’m actually starting to see some results from all the sessions I’ve been having with Jason Bravo, a personal trainer at New York Sports Club. I’m really glad of that, because it HURTS! Also, it’s kind of embarrassing — I’ll go into the free weight room with him, where all the “A” level gym people are, and I’ll huff away at weights that wouldn’t keep the papers on your desk in a stiff breeze. I make some pretty good faces, though — I look like Mark Wahlberg getting electrocuted in “Three Kings.” -
According to my mom, my grandmother left her two pieces of advice:
“Never carry a package by the string”, and “Never trust a man named Doc or Whitey.”
My grandfather had his own sage words, too, like “Never lose altitude unneccessarily.”
Now, after bitter experience, a splitting headache, and a day when I was three and a half hours late to work, I have my own piece of advice to add to the family wisdom:
Never, ever drink Scotch and Grappa on the same night. -
On Tuesday night, after I got done at my desk, I walked a couple of blocks down to the ABC building in Times Square to see David Blaine frozen in a block of ice. There was a long line, composed of Viacom workers from across the street, theatergoers who had just gotten out of their shows, and German tourists. The questions everyone was asking each other in line were “how is he getting paid for this?” and “he’s wearing a sweater, how cold can he be?”
Seeing him in person, though, was pretty impressive. The ice was much thicker than it appeared to be on the webcam; twelve or fourteen inches.
New Yorkers appear to be united in heaping calumny on the event, though. I took a cab home from Times Square, and the taxi driver, Abdul Hakim, was ranting about it the whole way. “He is cold, so what? He is wearing a sweater. Now, if he were dead for three days, and came back out of the ice, then his body would be not human, you know? So that would be something.”
Yeah, that would be something! -
I had a great Thanksgiving weekend in Philadelphia with my special friend Kate — we went to see the Christmas display at Longwood Gardens, learned to dance James Brown-style from this cat named Lenny at Vincent’s Jazz Bar in West Chester (more about that another time,) and went to the 15th Annual Turkey Pro Motorcycle Rally, hosted by Kate’s dad. The main event of the Turkey Pro is the Slow Race, where competitors try to go around a twisty track in the greatest possible time. The winner gets a huge monstrosity of a trophy, complete with motorcycle handlebars and a working horn and headlight. In fact, the winner is required to take it for the year.
Longwood Gardens is really, really cool — Kate and I bought season passes. It has a really large Victorian-style conservatory, which is a great thing to visit in the dead of winter.
tikaro.com 
